Using Optimistic Atomic Broadcast in Transaction Processing Systems

Bettina Kemme, Fernando Pedone, Gustavo Alonso, André Schiper Abstract:
Atomic broadcast primitives are often proposed as a mechanism to allow
fault-tolerant cooperation between sites in a
distributed system. Unfortunately, the delay incurred
before a message can be delivered makes it difficult
to implement high performance, scalable applications
on top of atomic broadcast primitives. Recently, a
new approach has been proposed for atomic broadcast
which, based on optimistic assumptions about the
communication system, reduces the average delay for
message delivery to the application. In this paper,
we develop this idea further and show how
applications can take even more advantage of the
optimistic assumption by overlapping the coordination
phase of the atomic broadcast algorithm with the
processing of delivered messages. In particular, we
present a replicated database architecture that
employs the new atomic broadcast primitive in such a
way that communication and transaction processing are
fully overlapped, providing high performance without
relaxing transaction correctness.
Technical Report No. 325, ETH Zürich, Departement of Computer Science, 1999.